I’ve often wondered why the God of the Old Testament seems different than the God of the New Testament.
I’ve also often wondered why we don’t see miracles like they used to.
Then i realized something. Most of what God said in the Old Testament was to the people that were already committed to him in a covenant relationship. Most of the people Jesus talked to in the New Testament were wayward people who had long since forsaken their covenant with him and needed saving again.
In the Old Testament God seemed to hold the people to a ridiculously rigorous standard, crushing any impurity that threatened to infect the rest. In the New Testament he seems eager to accept even prostitutes and the like if he only saw in them a slight change in heart. But if he was strict to someone in the New Testament it WAS to those who seemed to be pretty far along.
This makes me think two possibilities about God. . . that he’s lonely and mean and he wants to get everybody to commit before he starts to tell them how bad they are. . . or, he loves us all enough to call us his own and turn us into the purest, most liberated creatures that he built us to be, even if he has to seem like a harsh father while doing it.
And maybe this is why we don’t see miracles any more, at least in this American Culture. If we were as sinless and committed as the Jews in the best Old testament days maybe then we would be fit to be the houses of God’s miracles too.
Raw Spoon
